Turbonmic Support for AWS and Kubernetes

[DISCLAIMER:Turbonomic is, in fact, a sponsor of this blog. That said, there was no requirement or even request from them that I write this post. I’m writing it because it’s news that I think folks will find useful. No one from Turbonomic has contributed to, or reviewed the contents of this post.]

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably already know I’m a fan of Turbonomic’s suite of tools for monitoring, management, and automation. Personally, I believe they’re the best at what they do — providing application performance, uptime, and resiliency, along with improving over all IT infrastructure efficiency and automated remediation of potential problems for on-premises environments.

Of course, more organizations are moving their workloads into the public cloud, either exclusively or as part of a hybrid cloud set-up. An on-premises-only automation tool isn’t enough to meet these organizations’ needs.

So, Turbonomic has extended their suite of offerings by adding support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Kubernetes. I’ll talk about each of these, and let you know how you can take them for a six-month test drive for free.

Turbonomic for AWS

Yes, not all public cloud is AWS, but if you were developing software to support public cloud deployments and had to choose which provider to support first, you’d pick AWS, too.

AWS deployments and managing Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) instances can be tricky and require close monitoring to be cost-effective. While it’s true that Amazon’s cost model is “pay only for what you use”, their customers still need to be careful. If you spin up an EC2 instance to handle a temporary workload, Amazon won’t automatically stop charging you for that instance as soon as you’re no longer actively using it — you need to remember to shut it down (usually manually). Your costs will keep racking up as long as the instance is running, even if it’s idle.

Using Turbonomic with an AWS deployment can provide automation to help with this, spinning up new instances as they’re actually needed, in response to real-time workload demands, and spinning them down, again based on real-time workload demand, when they’re no longer needed.

Automated EC2 Instance Placement — Turbonomic allows customers to create policies to support their business requirements or constraints, and then ensure that new instances will automatically place new instances in the right AWS Zones and Regions to meet these policies. Examples include:

Placing instances in the Zone or Region with the least cost and least latency.

Placing instances that communicate with each other in the same Zone to minimize latency between them.

Restricting instances to the geographic region that the customer knows the majority of their end-users reside in, giving their users better performance.

Ensure High Availability (HA) Compliance — Turbonomic will ensure that HA instances are never placed in the same Zone, ensuring that the application can tolerate a Zone failure.

Automation of Vertical and Horizontal Scaling — Turbonomic can be set to automatically increase the size of an EC2 instance or scale it out (by adding additional instances) based on real-time actual application demand. As demand decreases, Turbonomic will save customers money by automatically scaling back (decreasing number of instances) or scaling down (decreasing the size of instances), again based on real-time actual application demand.

Turbonomic for Kubernetes

If you’re not familiar with it, Kubernetes is used for container orchestration. Originally developed by Google for in-house use managing their own IT infrastructure, Kubernetes has been released as open-source.

Kubernetes allows users to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. It groups containers that make up applications into logical units for easy discovery and management.

You know how if you ask someone to to name a public cloud provider, Amazon is far and away the most likely first answer you’ll receive? Well, if you ask folks who know containers to name a tool for container automation and orchestration, Kubernetes will likely be the first answer they’ll give.

Turbonomic can provide many benefits to Kubernetes, including:

Automated Scaling — Turbonomic automates vertical and horizontal scaling decisions in Kubernetes and across the entire infrastructure stack it’s running on. This automatic scale-up/down and scale-out/in based on actual real-time application demand allows containerized applications to run at maximum efficiency.

Availability

Both Turbonomic AWS Cloud Manager and Turbonomic for Kubernetes are GA and are available for purchase now.

Since these are new offerings for Turbonomic, they’re very interested in receiving user feedback on how it’s working, requests for new features and enhancements, and UI improvements. When you sign up for the six months free trial, you’ll receive a free license key good for three months. To get it renewed for another three months, Turbonomic will ask you to provide feedback on your experience with the offering(s).

If you do take either (or both) of these for a test drive, I’d love to hear how it went. Feel free to respond here in comments, or reach out to me directly if you’d prefer your thoughts be less public.